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Shorefall offers a natural thematic progression from the great Foundryside, further expanding the link between technology and oppression while presenting a memorable antagonist that challenges the protagonist’s worldview, daring her to find a better solution for society than his tyrannical nihilism.
When she was a slave in a plantation, doctors experimented on Sancia. Scriving is the skill that alters the properties of an object through a series of written commands, but instead of an object, the doctors were attempting to create a scrived person: a slave with special attributes, extremely powerful but also incapable of disobedience. Sancia, however, was granted the ability to [...]
This review contains spoilers.
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is an ambitious project that succeeds in revitalizing the franchise and bringing it back to its 2D roots: with great synergy between its combat and platform challenges, and brilliant art direction, the game only falters when it comes to its half-baked story, which seems almost unfinished.
We play as Sargon, the youngest member of an elite force of Persian warriors called the Immortals. The introduction focuses on their battle prowess, showing them repelling an invasion force and reversing the course of a lost battle almost on their own. The Immortals will appear often during the fight to assist Sargon, [...]
The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow is an effective point-and-click adventure game that excels in creating an ominous atmosphere that carries most of the cosmic horror narrative. With a focus on characters and setting, the game only falters in the abruptness of its ending, whose anticlimax avoids some important confrontations.
We play as Thomasina Bateman, a young archeologist who receives a letter from one Leonard Shoulder telling her of a historical site in the rural town of Bewlay, named Hob’s Barrow. However, when she arrives in the isolated village, her contact is nowhere to be found, people avoid talking about the barrow, and some residents even urge her to leave at [...]
Stephen King’s Revival is a novel that experiments with cosmic horror to tell a story much less interested in providing cheap scares than in discussing how our search for order (and justice) in life leads us to embrace a religion. The real horror of its narrative is not crafted around the danger of eldritch beings, but how our concept of an afterlife shapes our worldview and dictates our actions: to pose the question “but what if we are wrong”, that way madness lies.
The book is narrated in the first person by Jamie Morton, an old man who begins to recall his childhood, beginning on the day the new Methodist minister, Charles Jacobs, arrived in his town and changed his life [...]
“But can it run Crysis” was a humorous question back in 2007, as the game was infamous for testing the power of any PC when it was originally released. The 2021 remaster of Crysis aims to make it a demanding game for current hardware as well, but the more important question should have always been “should it run Crysis” instead: is this game just a piece of demanding software, a glorified tech demo, or is there something more to it that makes it worth our time?
The game opens with a distress message from a female scientist, who claims to have found something strange on an island right before the North Koreans took over her operation. We hear this message while looking at what [...]
The Shadow of the Gods, the first book in The Bloodsworn series, is a competent Nordic-inspired fantasy that presents a fascinating world rife with monsters and violence, where characters learn to be brutal to survive. The novel, however, is let down by a problematic structure that makes some plotlines take too long to get moving, while others suffer from the lack of a proper conclusion.
The story starts with a hunt. While young Breca is preparing to throw a spear at a reindeer, his mother, Orka, teaches him that “Death is a part of life.” He misses the shot, however, because a wolf startles the deer: in The Shadow of the Gods, there will always be a creature lurking in the [...]